1. Cognition What is Cognition? Why Use Developmental Theories
to Understand Cognition?
Issues with Stage Theories and what they suggest

2. © 1999 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Jean Piaget
Piaget was trained as a biologist and as a philosopher
Piaget’s view of the intellectual development of the child reflected an interaction between biology and experience
Principles of knowledge:
Seek the organization by which the child understands the world
Identify the functional significance of knowledge (that is, knowledge allows a child to adapt to the world)
© John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

3. Piaget’s Theory Why has it lasted? Piaget believed:
Observations and descriptions of thinking at different ages
Breadth
Thought-provoking observations to support the theory
Nature/Nurture and Continuity/Discontinuity
Piaget believed:
Children are constructivists
Children are intrinsically motivated to learn

4. Piaget and Developmental Themes
Nature/Nurture
Organization
Adaptation
Continuity
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibration
Discontinuity
Qualitative changes
Broad application
Brief transitions
Invariant sequences

5. Stages Sensorimotor Birth–2 years Understands world through senses and
actions
Preoperational
2–7 years
Understands
world
through
language and
mental
images
Concrete
operational
7–12 years
Understands
world
through
logical
thinking and
categories
Formal
operational
12 years
onward
Understands
world
through
hypothetical
thinking and
scientific
reasoning

6. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth–2 years)
Substage 1 (birth–1 month)
Modify reflexes
Centered on own body
Substage 2 (1–4 months)
Organize reflexes
Integrate actions
Substage 3 (4–8 months)
Repetition of actions resulting in pleasurable or interesting results
Object Permanence

7. Substage 4 (8–12 months) Substage 5 (12–18 months)
Begin searching for hidden objects
Fragile mental representations
A-Not-B Error
Substage 5 (12–18 months)
Active exploration of potential use of objects
Substage 6 (18–24 months)
Enduring mental representations
Deferred Imitation

8. Infant Knowledge of Gravity
By age 6.5 months, infants spend longer time looking at the impossible event than the possible event
(Figure reprinted with permission from “How Do Infants Learn About the
Physical World” from Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 3, (1994) p 134.)

9. Object Permanence Assessment
Object permanence refers to the knowledge that objects exist when out of sight.
Baillargeon used the habituation procedure to assess object permanence.
Infants habituated to A, but showed long looking times at C
(Figure adapted with permission from “Object Permanence in 3½- and 4 ½-Mo nth-Old Infants” by
R. Baillargeon, 1987, Developmental Psychology, 23, p 656. Copyright ©1987 by APA)

10. Preoperational Stage ( 2–7 years)
Development in:
Symbolic Representation
Weaknesses in:
Egocentrism
The 3 Mountain Task
Taking other people’s perspectives
Centration
Animism
Artificialism
Realism

12. Assessing Egocentrism: The Three Mountain Problem
(Figure adapted with permission from The Child’s Conception of Space (p 211) by J. Paiget and B. Inhelder,
1956, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Copyright © 1956 by Routledge and Kegan Paul)

13. Piaget’s three-mountains task
When asked to choose the picture that shows what the doll sitting in the seat across the table would see, most children below age 6 choose the picture showing how the scene looks to them, illustrating their difficulty in separating their own perspective from that of others.

15. Egocentrism
An example of young children’s egocentric conversations.

16. A 4-year-old’s drawing of a summer day
Note the use of simple artistic conventions, such as the V-shaped leaves on the flowers (Dennis, 1992, p. 234).

17. Balance scale study by Case (1992)
When asked to predict which side of a balance scale, like the one shown above, would go down if the arm were allowed to move, 5- and 6-year-olds almost always center their attention on the amount of weight and ignore the distances of the weights from the fulcrum. Thus, they would predict that the left side would go down, although the right side actually would.

18. Piaget’s train problem
If two trains start and stop at the same time, but one stops farther up the track, children below age 8 usually say that the train that stopped farther up the track traveled for more time.

19. Assessing Conservation
© John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Vasta, 3e Fig. 8.7

20. Concrete Operational Stage (7–12 years)
Conservation
Phase I
Child sees 2 objects, agrees objects are identical in number or quantity (dimension of interest)
Phase II
One object is transformed, but the dimension of interest is not altered
Phase III
The child is asked whether the dimension of interest is still equal

21. Formal Operational Stage (12 and onward)
According to Piaget, this stage is not universal
Characteristics:
Hypothetical Thinking
Truth, justice, morality
Systematic Reasoning of all possible outcomes
Scientific Method

22. What Piaget Left Positives Negatives
A good overview of children’s thinking at different points
Appealing perspective
Broad spectrum of development and ages
Fascinating observations
Negatives
Stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth

23. Information Processing Theories
Features:
Processes involved in children’s thinking
Process occurs over time
Metaphor of a computational system
Continuous cognitive change
Cognitive growth is not abrupt, but step-by-step
Children are problem solvers
Determine goal obstacles strategy goal
Planning
Develops over time
There are signs of planning as early as 12 months
Why don’t children plan?
Want ends before the means, overoptimistic, high failure rate
Analogical Reasoning
The younger the child the more similar/parallel the problem needs to be to make a connection

24. Developmental Issues 1. Basic Processes
Encoding
Speed of Processing
4. Cognitive Processes Work Together
2. Strategies
Rehearsal
Selective Attention
Utilization Deficiency
3. Content Knowledge
Scripts

25. Other Information-Processing Theories
Connectionist Theories/Neural Network Approach
The simultaneous activity of neurons, interconnected processing units
Sequential and parallel processing
Dynamic-System Theories
How varied aspects of a child function as a single, integrated whole
For example, perception, attention, language, memory, emotions, motor activity
Overlapping-Waves Theories
Focus on the variability of children’s thinking

26. The overlapping-waves model
The overlapping waves model proposes that at any one age, children use multiple strategies; that with age and experience, they rely increasingly on more strategies (the ones with the higher numbers); and that development involves changes in use of existing strategies as well as discovery of new approaches.

27. Core-Knowledge Theories
Features:
Study areas important throughout human evolution
Children’s reasoning is more advanced than Piaget believed
Children are active learners
Children are born with many specialized—not only general—learning abilities
Domain Specific
Children make informal theories (biology, psychology, physics)

28. Sociocultural Theories
Features:
Cognitive development occurs through interactions between child and other
Occurs within a broad cultural context
Children are teachers and learners
Children are products of their cultures
Change occurs through:
Guided Participation
Intersubjectivity (Joint Attention, Social Referencing)
Social Scaffolding
Zone of Proximal Development